Tag Archives: mac

Opinion

Snow Leopard

Most people reading this will know that Snow Leopard refers to version 10.6 of the Macintosh Operating System, Apple’s latest update released late last month.

I wasn’t sure whether I should upgrade initially. I have been stung before by being an early adopter. Mac OS X 10.4 was a nightmare on my iMac G5. The big ticket new features such as Dashboard and Spotlight worked just fine ((Some would argue with that statement. Personally I never had any serious problems with Spotlight.)). What didn’t work were little thing like, oh, networking. Eight times out of ten it couldn’t connect to my AirPort Base station. This made almost everything, including downloading patches to fix this very problem, a compete and utter pain. I think it took until 10.4.3 before everything worked reliably.

I waited several months before making the leap to 10.5 for this very reason. But Leopard at least had some neat new features (and the lame new look of the dock) to try to tempt me over. Snow Leopard, by design, has few user-facing enhancements to make it worth the risk.

Of course I’m not a typical end user. The reason I moved from Windows to the Mac back in 2001 was because of its Unix underpinnings:

MacOS X is based on a BSD Unix kernel (called Darwin and available under an Open Source licence) and has an enhanced Macintosh user interface grafted on top. This is truly the key. You have the complex internals available from a command-line when you need it and a state of the art GUI when you just need a word processor.

And now that I’m an iPhone developer I have a vested interest in using the best tools available for the platform, and they were only available for Snow Leopard. Also a lure where the new APIs (Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL) and language enhancements (blocks). I’ve not done much Macintosh development but these were exactly the kind of things that would potentially get me started.

All this is a long way of saying that, despite the risks, I took the plunge anyway.

And…

Well, so far it’s pretty much been a non-event.

Yes, it’s quicker. Most noticeably in starting up, shutting down, Time Machine and in Mail. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice little things — and I’m still finding new ones — but it’s mostly been entirely seamless, almost an invisible upgrade. And I mean that in a good way.

Yes, all my programs still work. I’d read reports that PhotoShop Elements didn’t work under Snow Leopard. I can report that it takes a considerable amount of time to start up and frequently beach-balls afterwards. Or, put another way, it works just as well as it did under 10.5.

I’d also seen scare-stories about old versions of Microsoft Office and other PPC applications that need Rosetta to run but, again, I’ve not seen any problems ((To be fair, I moved to Office 2008 around the same time.)). Even lower level software like my screen calibration program and film scanner software are fine.

I have two negatives so far, both fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

The first affects Yummy and Yummy Browser and that’s the fact that the new version of Xcode only supports developing for iPhone OS 3.x ((It’s true that you can build for older releases but there’s no way to test it in the simulator. I’m not willing to release software that I’ve not been able to test.)). Luckily there are very few users on 2.x but it’s still a little disappointing that I have had to make the move.

Secondly, it’s my printer. There is no longer a HP-supplied driver for my 2002-era DeskJet. Luckily Apple includes GutenPrint with Snow Leopard and there’s a bundled driver that recognises it. So on the plus-side I don’t have to go out and buy a new printer as I feared I might have to. On the down side the quality is just not there. While it was never a match for any contemporary photo printer, it was more than adequate for my needs. With GutenPrint, text is readable but there’s noticeable banding. I’m not sure I’d use it any more for “official” letters, though maybe I’m just being a snob. Photos have the same issue with banding but have the added distraction of some coarse dappling as a substitute for the more subtle colours.

No significant upgrade is going to be entirely problem-free but overall I’m happy with it. It’s about as easy as it could be and, despite Apple’s claim of no new features, there are certainly tangible benefits to making the leap.

Links

My delicious.com bookmarks for August 28th through September 3rd

Links

My delicious.com bookmarks for August 3rd through August 6th

  • UK ID Card Technology Cloned… – "… in 12 minutes." Wonder when the government will get the message that ID cards are a bad idea. Oh, and there's no such thing as unforgeable.
  • The hidden truth behind drug company profits – "The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live." Big companies and the patent system effectively kill the poorest and most vulnerable people.
  • Bodega – Interesting idea: an app store for the Mac. Not run by Apple and hence no crazy review process!
Blog

First Mac

I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was:

A white iBook G3, paid extra to get the 600Mhz version with the faster bus speed and an impossible-to-use-it -all 384Mb of memory

And that’s entirely true but I can’t tell the full story in 140 characters, hence this post.

The first Mac I ever used was at university. Durham wasn’t big on Macs but there were a few lying around in the labs. I always liked playing around with new toys and so I occasionally used one, if only to bring up a terminal to Telnet into the Unix server and check my email.

This was back in ’92 or ’93 and email was only accessible on the big Solaris and HP-UX servers. The timing also meant that PCs were on Windows 3.1 and so fairly basic. Using a Mac, an LC with a tiny colour screen if I remember correctly, at the time was pretty cool.

What I didn’t realise was that the sound on early nineties Macs was substantially more advanced than on PCs of the time. I found this out the hard and embarrassing way.

One day between lectures I made a bee-line for the LC and brought up the terminal application. The standard of my typing, then and now, is such that it usually takes several attempts to get the server name correct. The Mac would make a sound when it couldn’t find the server.

Except this time someone had changed the default system beep and replaced it with a thirty second long sound sample called “orgasm.”

Did I say that the speakers on that LC were surprisingly loud?

I don’t think I used a Mac again for nearly ten years.

Links

My delicious.com bookmarks for January 5th through January 7th

Opinion

Eight Best Computer Books

It’s been over five years since I last told you about my favourite computer and programming related books (don’t believe the date on that article. It’s been edited lightly a couple of times since I first posted it).

Having said that, some things have not changed. The vast majority of books on the shelves of your local retailer are very specific. Publishers seem to eschew broad, generally useful texts in preference for yet another beginners guide to Microsoft Word or C++ (or, more likely, Visual C++ 2005 Special Easter Edition SP2). I do not understand this. Sure, there’s a genuine need for “how to” books for specific technologies but is it not more useful to learn how to solve problems in general rather than how to solve a particular problem with a particular product?

Worse, most are not even particularly well written. Deadlines are so strict that authors have to write quickly rather than accurately or well. Ultimately the drive to be the first publisher with the definitive guide on Word 2007 (August Edition) trumps all. One that galls me is that most programming language books assume that you are learning to program from scratch. Is C++ really likely to be your first language? I think not.

The other continuing trend is the size of them. Is it necessary for every book to be a thousand pages long and be stuffed with screen-shots? None of my favourites are like this.

As with the last list, I have not just focused on your typical “computer science” text, if anything I have shied away from them. Hopefully if you go pick up a copy of all these books you’ll find them all to be both useful and entertaining to read.

Additionally, I find most of them to be books that are worth returning to, if not as a reference guide then as something that increased experience make each read make more sense.

So, let’s get to the point. What are my favourite computer books, and why?

  1. Code Complete. If you’re writing or designing software you need this book. As I said last time, it ‘is one of those books that does the job so well it has no obvious competition. It describes the complete coding process right from low level design through to unit testing and, while most people would have been very prescriptive, McConnell outlines the pros and cons of each approach.’ Now on its second edition, it is still, as far as I know, without peer.
  2. The Mythical Man Month. People never seem to learn. Managers still seem to add more staff to already late projects. Brookes said all this, and a lot more, in this book way back in the seventies.
  3. Accidental Empires. Robert X Cringely’s history of the early PC industry is a fascinating and entertainingly written anecdote-fest. He claims neither to be complete nor objective, yet seems to cover all the bases. Since most people these days deal predominantly with x86 architecture machines I think everyone should know the heritage and how we got from Bletchley Park to an iMac. (But without the iMac as it was written years before Apple returned to form.)
  4. Professional Software Development. When I first bought this I was a little annoyed. It’s actually the second edition of McConnell’s ‘After the Goldrush,’ just coming with a different name! I’m not sure that I would have bought it had I known, but I would have missed out. This is the only book of the eight here that talks about the industry as a whole, and how we should move away from the typical, and surprisingly common, “code and fix” development. He talks about certifications; architects; heavyweight methodologies; personality types; and a whole lot more. I can’t say that I agree with every last sentence, but it’s well worth reading just to get a perspective.
  5. Peopleware. It’s amazing to think that it took until the 1980’s before the human elements of writing software were seriously considered. Even now most Computer Science seems to concentrate on the more technical aspects. This book was probably the first to discuss the “human factors” of software development and is still the best that I’ve read.
  6. Programming Perl ((This link is to the third edition. I currently only have the second.)). I include this book at least partially because I wanted to show that it was possible to have a densely technical book that was also well thought out and entertaining. The structure is superb and I can’t think of any other programming tomes that have made me laugh out loud.
  7. In the beginning was the command line… ((You can also download it from Neal Stephenson’s website.)) I think that this is an interesting book for two reasons. Firstly it describes the reason why Unix is as it is better than any other. Secondly, it explains the various major operating systems (and some minor or — now — non-existent ones) in approachable analogies rather than dense jargon.
  8. Conceptual Blockbusting. There are few other professions where your output is almost entirely brainpower. A computer program is really little more than a slightly less ephemeral rendition of pure thought. So if you can’t think your way out of a particular problem you’re in trouble! This book makes you more aware of your own intellectual processes and outlines different ways of approaching problems. Invaluable.

As you may have noticed, many of these books are the same as last time! Does this indicate that I’ve been reading less? A little perhaps, but I’d like to think that it’s because by picking books not related to specific versions of particular technologies I’m increasing my odds of finding the classics.

What do you think? Any other good choices that I missed?